Economic Sophisms and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen”. Bastiat Frédéric
the interests of manufacturing towns are not always in opposition to those of those on the coast.”
No, but it has to be said that both, understood as the petitioners understand them, are totally opposed to the interests of the countryside, agriculture, and consumers.
This, sirs, is what you wanted to say! This is the aim of your subtle economic distinctions! You want the law to prevent finished goods from crossing the ocean in order for the much more expensive transport of raw and dirty materials, including a lot of waste, to provide more cargo for your merchant navy and put your shipping to greater use. This is what you call a wise economy.
What! Why do you not also ask for Russian pines to be shipped with their branches, bark, and roots? For Mexican gold in its mineral state and leather from Buenos Aires still attached to the bones of stinking carcasses?
Soon, I expect, railway shareholders, however small their majority in the Chambers, will pass a law forbidding the production in Cognac of the brandy drunk in Paris. Would not to decree by law the transport of ten casks of wine for one cask of brandy provide the essential income for their labor to manufacturers in Paris and at the same time set the powers of our locomotives into action?
For how long more will people close their eyes to such a simple truth?
The purpose of manufacturing, of shipping, and of labor is the general good, the public good. Creating industries that serve no purpose, encouraging superfluous transport, and supporting unnecessary labor, not for the public good but at public expense, is to achieve a genuine contradiction in terms.7 It is not labor that is intrinsically desirable but consumption. Any labor that yields no output represents a loss. To pay sailors to carry useless refuse across the sea is as though they were being paid to make pebbles skip across the surface of the water.8 We therefore come to the conclusion that all
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economic sophisms, in spite of their infinite variety, have this in common: they confuse the means with the end and develop one at the expense of the other.
PUBLISHING HISTORY:
Original title: “Métaphores.”
Place and date of first publication: No date given. First published in book form.
First French edition as book or pamphlet: Economic Sophisms (First Series) (1846).
Location in Paillottet’s edition of OC: Vol. 4. Sophismes économiques. Petits pamphlets I, pp. 115–19.
Previous translations: 1st English ed., 1846; 1st American ed., 1848; FEE ed., 1964.
Sometimes sophisms expand and penetrate the entire fabric of a long and heavy theory. More often they contract, reduce in size, and become a principle, entirely hidden in one word.
God preserve us, Paul-Louis1 said, from cunning men and metaphors! And in fact, it would be difficult to say which of the two causes the most harm to our planet. It is the devil, you say; he puts in all of us, such as we are, the spirit of plunder in our hearts. Yes, but he leaves the repression of abuses completely up to the resistance of those that suffer from them. It is sophism that paralyzes this resistance. The sword that malice places in the hands of attackers would be powerless if sophism did not shatter the shield on the arms of those under attack, and Malebranche was right in inscribing the following sentence on the frontispiece of his book: Error is the cause of human misery.2
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And look at what happens. Ambitious hypocrites have a sinister interest,3 for example, in sowing the seed of national hatred in the mind. This disastrous seed may develop and lead to general conflagration, cause civilization to stop, spill torrents of blood, and draw down the most terrible of all scourges on the country, invasion. In any case, before these events occur, these feelings of hatred diminish us in the eyes of other nations and reduce those people in France who have retained some vestige of a love of justice to blush for their country. These are certainly great evils, and in order for the public to be protected against the intrigues of those who want to run the risk of such events, it would be enough for them to have a clear view of the matter. How does it happen that this clear view is clouded? Through metaphor. The meaning of three or four words is altered, strained, and degraded, and this says it all.
Take the word invasion itself.
A French ironmaster says: “May we be preserved from an invasion of iron from England.” An English landlord exclaims: “Let us reject the invasion of wheat from France!” And they propose that the barriers between the two peoples be raised. Barriers constitute isolation, isolation leads to hatred, hatred to war, and war to invasion. “What does it matter?” say the two sophists, “is it not better to be exposed to the risk of invasion than to accept certain invasion?” And the people believe them and the barriers remain.
And yet, what analogy is there between an exchange and an invasion? What similarity can be established between a warship which comes to vomit shells, fire, and devastation on our towns and a merchant ship that comes to offer us the opportunity of exchanging goods for other goods freely and voluntarily?
I would say the same for the word flood. This word normally has a negative meaning because the common characteristics of floods are to ravage fields and crops. If nevertheless they leave greater value on the land than they remove, as do the floods of the Nile, we ought to bless and deify them, following the example of the Egyptians. Well then, before railing against the
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floods of foreign goods, before erecting obstructive and costly obstacles in their path, do people ask themselves whether these are floods that ravage or those that fertilize? What would we think of Mehemet Ali4 if, instead of raising dams across the Nile at huge expense to extend the range of its floods, he spent his piastres digging a deeper bed for it so that Egypt would no longer be soiled by this foreign silt brought down from the Mountains of the Moon?5 We are showing precisely this degree of wisdom and reason when, with the support of millions, we wish to preserve our country … from what? From the benefits with which nature has endowed other climates.
Among the metaphors that conceal an entire and disastrous theory, there are none more commonly used than the one that uses the words tribute, tributary.
These words have become so commonplace that they have become synonyms of purchase and purchaser and the two sets of words are now used indiscriminately in place of one another.
However, there is as much distance between a tribute and a purchase as between a theft and an exchange, and I would as much like to hear it said that Cartouche6 had broken into my strongbox and purchased a thousand écus, as to hear it said repeatedly to our deputies: “We have paid the tribute to Germany for a thousand horses that it has sold to us.”
For what makes the action of Cartouche not a purchase is that he has not placed in my strongbox, with my consent, an equivalent value to the one he has taken.
And what makes the payment of 500,000 francs that we have made to Germany not a tribute, is exactly that it has not received this money for no return but because it has delivered to us in exchange one thousand horses that we ourselves estimated were worth our 500,000 francs.
Should we therefore in all seriousness bring up such abuses of language
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again? Why not, since they are very seriously bandied about in both journals and books?
And let us not imagine that they slip out from a few writers whose ignorance extends to their use of language! For every one who refrains from this, I will quote you ten who indulge in it and who belong to the upper classes as well, such as Argout, Dupin, Villèle,7 and assorted peers, deputies, ministers, that is to say, all men whose word is